IS THERE NO SHAME?

WITH THE SANDUSKY TRIAL UNDERWAY I THOUGHT IT WAS WORTH REPOSTING THIS ARTICLE FROM 7 MONTHS AGO. NOTHING HAS CHANGED MY CONCLUSIONS.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth. ” ― William Faulkner

I wish I could believe William Faulkner’s advice was possible in the world we live in today. But sadly, I am losing hope in our civilization. We seem to have entered a death spiral with little likelihood of pulling out. Our society has become so degraded and our populace so apathetic and willfully ignorant, that I think we are too far gone to recover. Honesty, truth and compassion have been soundly defeated by injustice, lying and greed. Our technologically advanced society has become a stinking cesspool, devoid of humanity, common sense and morality. Those with the power and wealth who control our country do not concern themselves with quaint concepts like good and evil, right and wrong, or moral and immoral. Sociopaths see no obligation to society, humanity, or posterity. They only care about themselves, their wealth, their status, their reputation, and their control of others. They are incapable of feeling shame or remorse. They blindly march forward towards their own and society’s self-destruction.

Joe Paterno was fired by the Penn State Board of Trustees on Wednesday night as head football coach of Penn State. It was the first good decision that has been made in the last two decades by the leaders of Penn State. The man was told that his Defensive coordinator was seen in the locker room shower raping a 10 year old boy in 2002. He did not call the police and report this crime. He and the other top officials at Penn State brushed this crime under the rug, allowing at least seven more young boys to be raped by this monster. The 28 year old graduate assistant not only did nothing to stop the crime he witnessed, but he accepted a position as an assistant coach, knowing that Paterno and the Athletic Director never did anything to hold Sandusky accountable for his crime. Sandusky was still on campus working out as of last week. The actions of all the players in this disgusting example of how far our society has degenerated are enough to make someone lose all hope for humanity:

• Jerry Sandusky creates a charitable organization so he can gain access to little boys. Multiple incidents are witnessed on campus from 1994 through 2002. A mother reports Sandusky to the Penn State police in 1998 and nothing is done by the men in the Administration. The investigation is dropped, but Tim Curley forces Sandusky to retire in 1999. It is clear that everyone in the top echelon of Penn State knew Sandusky was a deviant pedophile. But letting it become public would have been a black mark on the football program and could have reduced the huge profits generated by Paterno’s kingdom.
• After his forced retirement he is still given access to the campus and locker room facilities. He is caught having anal sex with a 10 year old boy in the locker room shower by a 28 year old man, who chooses not to intervene and save the boy. Joe Paterno does the absolute minimum when informed of this horrific crime. After this crime is covered up by all the key men running the show at Penn State, it just becomes business as usual for Joe and his cronies.
• Sandusky continues to rape little boys for the next eight years because of the cowardice and complete lack of morality exhibited by the men in high places at Penn State.
• With the issuance of the grand jury report last week, the psychotic nature of these men was on display for the world to witness. In a stunning display of arrogance and hubris, Paterno and the President of Penn State announced their full support for the Athletic Director and VP of Finance who were arrested. These men did not think they did anything wrong. They clung to the fact that they adhered to the laws created by other men. In a despicable display, Joe Paterno led a cheer at a pep rally in front of his house with his arms raised in victory. At least eight boys had their lives ruined and Joe Paterno leads a cheer.
• The Board of Trustees summoned the courage to fire Paterno and the President last night. In another display that makes me wonder about the future of our country, thousands of students rioted in support of Joe Paterno, breaking windows, turning over news vans, and starting fires. Are these young people incapable of critical thinking and are just driven by emotion and mindless rage? Can’t they distinguish between facts and lies? Do they care more about football than innocent children being raped?

I have been blind with rage for the last week as I’ve watched the powerful men of Penn State attempt to retain their power and reputations at the expense of truth, honesty, and accepting responsibility for their actions and willful inaction. As I’ve watched this tragedy unfold I was struck by the thought process of rich men in positions of power. They have huge egos and believe they are above the law. They think so highly of themselves they believe they can make the rules and ignore the laws which the little people must follow. They have no moral compass whatsoever. They cannot be shamed. The most despicable behavior by prominent men has been willfully overlooked because these men generate $50 million of profit per year for the university. Their sociopathic desire to protect their reputations and power has led to a scandal of such epic proportions that it will haunt Penn State forever and has permanently damaged the institution.

This is an institutional cancer that eats away at the fabric of our society. It is not isolated to Penn State. It is a societal sickness that threatens to overwhelm every facet of our lives. There is a constant thread that runs through every incident that comes to light. In 99% of the cases it is men protecting men. Money and greed always trump morality and truth. The exact circumstances can be observed in the priest abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in the last five years. Pedophile priests have existed within the Catholic Church for decades. The Penn State situation shows that pedophiles exist everywhere in our society. The bottom line is that they are sick men and need to be locked up and kept away from little boys. There is no more heinous criminal act than a grown man raping a little boy. Anyone who does this is pure evil and must be punished.

The Catholic Church’s wealth is almost beyond measurement. There are 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. The pope is one of the most powerful men on earth. Cardinals and bishops throughout the world wield tremendous influence over their flocks. As young Catholic boys you are taught that priests represent Jesus Christ on earth. They are treated with reverence and fear by little Catholic boys. Little Catholic boys would never question the motives of a priest. They are taught to obey, because a priest is the same as Jesus Christ. These beliefs allowed pedophile priests to prey on thousands of little boys around the world for decades with little or no backlash. Those crimes were horrific enough by themselves, but the actions of the bishops, cardinals and even the popes who have known about these crimes make it ten times worse. Again, powerful men will ignore rules, regulations, laws and simple human decency in order to protect their wealth, power, and reputations. Cardinals and bishops knew that priests were raping little boys and their solution was to transfer them to another parish where they could find fresh meat. The thought never entered their minds to turn these perverts in to the police. Their only concern was how a scandal would impact their beloved institution. Little boys were sacrificed at the altar of the Catholic Church by evil men.

The cover-up continues to this day. The Catholic Church uses the statute of limitations as their defense against the continuous stream of cases that continue to mount. They secretly pay out hundreds of millions to the victims as long as they promise to keep quiet. They use bankruptcy laws to close down parishes and avoid paying civil penalties for the crimes committed by its hierarchy. They hire public relations firms to create false and misleading stories designed to obscure the truth about the biggest criminal conspiracy in history. The powerful sociopathic men who were supposed to represent Christian teachings have destroyed the lives of thousands of boys in order to protect their institution. The end result is that in addition to the thousands of lives destroyed by the pedophile priests, hundreds of thousands of Catholics have lost faith in the leadership and have abandoned the church. The wealth these sociopaths attempted to protect has been eroded as donations have dried up and lawsuit payouts have mounted.

Not only have our educational and religious institutions failed us, but our financial and political institutions have spectacularly self-destructed over the last decade. Shockingly, these institutions have been run predominantly by men. At one time banks were stodgy institutions that abhorred risk and methodically made profits year after year by lending to people and businesses capable of paying them back. Investment firms were partnerships. If any one partner was to take an excessive risk, they could wipe out the personal wealth of the other partners. Therefore, they never took excessive risks or used excessive leverage. Their boring business model generated modest profits year after year. The officers of banks and investment houses were well compensated, but not excessively so. The leaders of these firms were children of the Great Depression. They understood bad times.

During the 1990’s they were displaced by a new generation of leaders. This has not turned out well for our country. These psychopathic CEOs were given the green light by their fellow psychopaths in Congress and at the Federal Reserve to loot and pillage to their heart’s delight. This conspiracy of thieves broke down the barriers between traditional banking and gambling using excessive leverage. They captured the regulatory agencies that were supposed to police them and leveraged their bets 30 to 1. They created fraudulent mortgage instruments designed to lure the stupid and crooked. They marketed debt to anyone with a breath and ability to scratch an X on a piece of paper. They designed derivatives so complex that even their own Harvard MBAs couldn’t figure out how they worked. They bribed rating agencies into stamping a AAA credit rating on crap so toxic that they joked about the idiots they were selling it to. They shorted the very same derivatives they were selling to their clients. These psychopaths raked in hundreds of billions in fees, salaries and bonuses, while detonating a nuclear bomb on the worldwide financial system.

When their bets came up craps, they had the gall to hold the American people hostage for trillions in bailouts. Their fellow psychopaths in Congress gladly forked over the money. Rather than mend their ways, these evil men have returned to their excessive risk taking and continue to pay themselves billions in compensation, while the American middle class is smothered to death under mountains of debt. These evil Wall Street geniuses have shown no remorse as seven million people have lost their jobs and millions more have lost their homes due to the greed and avarice displayed on an epic scale.

Wall Street bankers exhibit the epitome of psychopathic behavior, showing lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others. Though lacking empathy and emotional depth, they often manage to pass themselves off as average individuals by feigning emotions. These Wall Street bankers will never willingly accept responsibility for their actions. They continue to use their wealth and power to control the politicians in Washington DC and the misinformation propagated by the corporate media they control. They own and control the Federal Reserve and will print money until the whole system collapses in a spectacular implosion that destroys our financial system. They only care about their own wealth, influence and status. They have no shame.

When I consider all that is wrong in our society, I become despondent, angry and despairing for the future of our country. It seems that everyone in positions of power across the spectrum of education, religion, finance, and politics are psychopaths, bent upon self-destruction no matter the cost to society or unborn generations. Our nation has degenerated into an egocentric, self-loathing, vain, shallow excuse for a civilization. There is anger flaring up, but it is just as likely to be misdirected and misinformed. The lack of critical thinking skills and the overwhelming effects of media propaganda has so degraded the intelligence of the populace that when the system breaks down in the next few years, the masses will clamor for a savior rather than seeking truthful answers and willingly making the sacrifices required to get our nation back on track. This country will get what it deserves – a despotic ruler and a brutish civilization governed on the basest of principles. This is what happens when a society rewards lying and greed over honesty and compassion. There are consequences to actions and inactions alike. We’ve made our choice.